The Multifaceted World of Censorship
I’ve only been publishing on Medium for a couple of months. In fact, I published my first article here on April 7th.
So I was rather surprised the other day when a reader shared some screen-shots showing some of my articles flagged with warnings and notifying everyone that my content is “under review as a potential violation” of Medium’s rules.
“If You Only Follow Mainstream News, You Have No Clue About Ukraine” was tagged with a notice. So was “Yes, There ARE Nazis in Ukraine.”
And my article titled “Babushka Z” was flagged.
A quick scroll through Medium’s rules reveals the usual “don’ts” of publishing. Don’t publish graphic images. Don’t publish porn. Don’t threaten violence. Don’t publish hate messages. No copyright infringement. No spam. No collection of people’s data for marketing purposes. And so on.
Check, check and check. I am careful to attribute sources. I do not post graphic images in my stories, although I may link to them with a warning statement. I credit original sources for all materials used. I correct errors when I am made aware of them. I’m certainly not encouraging violence or hate by providing coverage of an ongoing war.
I don’t see anything in Medium’s rules about a requirement that every story about the war in Ukraine must be in lockstep with NATO and its narratives, and I am far from the only person critical of NATO who publishes on Medium.
No one is forced to agree with what I write. You don’t have to like it. My work exists only to make people question more. Question all the narratives flooding your senses. Connect the dots on your own. Use your mind! Develop critical thinking.
I want people to be aware that there are many different perspectives on this war other than the ones which flood mainstream news in the west. And yet, here I am with my work under review. I suppose I have not posted enough Ukrainian flags. Here, I’ll make up for that.
Ukrainian “enemies list”
I have a few hunches about who reported me. Neo-Nazis do not like their atrocities being exposed and they gang up on anyone who writes about the war they waged against civilians in the Donbas region of Ukraine for eight long years.
I’ve talked with other writers who have been bullied online by these people. There is even a website called “Myrotvorets” which means “Peacemaker” in Ukrainian. As with all things in fascism, the name is very misleading. In fact, the site itself contains a list of “enemies of Ukraine” which includes many journalists, some I am acquainted with personally, who write about the war. These people are openly doxed and placed on a “kill list.”
Even Wikipedia admits that people’s names and home addresses are posted on that site, though the whole story is much more sinister. You can go to the site yourself, but I’ll warn you, it’s a very ugly rabbit hole. Right on the homepage are horrific photos of dead Russian soldiers in various states of decomposition, whose faces are posted there in the hopes that their mothers will see them. And that’s only the beginning.
Anyone who is not 100% in lockstep with Zelensky, the Banderites, and the neo-Nazis is an “enemy of Ukraine.” The list is long. Journalist Eva Bartlett recently reported that she is on the kill list. She currently resides in Moscow, Russia and says that she feels safer there than she did in Canada, where there are known Nazi collaborators.
Hilariously, even Henry Kissinger was added to the list when he stated that Ukraine cannot win the war with Russia. Kissinger is well known for his NATO advocacy and his famous suggestion of dropping nukes on a Soviet military base in Cuba during the Cold War. So he is hardly a friend of Russia. But that’s still not good enough for the Banderites.
When someone on the list is killed, red writing appears on their photo declaring them “liquidated.” That was what happened to Italian journalist Andrea Rocchelli, who was killed in 2014 by Ukrainian troops during an attack on Donbas. Below his photo, the word “CIA” appears, and in the top right corner of the website’s homepage, it says “Langley, VA, USA.” You can draw whatever conclusions you want to from that.
Censorship by social media
Even without kill lists, censorship in the western world is rampant. At the behest of governments, which are trying to control mainstream narratives about the war, social media tech giants are almost gleefully censoring people left and right.
Anyone who shares stories about what the Ukrainians did to Russian-speaking civilians in Donbas gets censored. I shared these stories myself on social media for years and they were consistently ignored because algorithms moved them down in the feed so that no one could see them. And the few people who did see them, mostly ignored them anyway because they didn’t actually care about those people.
I shared photos of little children who were killed by shrapnel. Schools and hospitals bombed to bits. Even the famous fire at the Trade Union Building in Odessa in 2014, where neo-Nazis burned 40 people alive and shot any who tried to escape, did not seem to illicit any concern. The only ones who cared were the ones who already knew about it. The rest didn’t want to know.
Perhaps without all the censorship by social media, more people might have been interested, but I’m not sure. In my experience, the majority of people believe the mainstream news, even though it has a long history of lying. They trust the “experts” and the pundits no matter how many times they lie or distort the truth. There is no getting through to people who are that badly brainwashed.
Censorship and money
This is not my first experience with censorship. Long before I started publishing articles about geopolitics on Medium, I worked as a television reporter in the United States and before that, I worked in television in the Soviet Union during its final days.
You might be surprised to learn that I was censored more in the United States than I was in the USSR.
When I was a fledgling reporter in a small market, I once put together an exposé on a local car dealership. I had been approached by a guy who had recently bought a car and paid an extra $300 for a car alarm system. Boy, was he surprised when he found that the key which unlocked his alarm, thus giving him access to his car, also worked on his friend’s car which was purchased at the same dealership. And both of them were surprised when a third person’s key worked too! If they could open each other’s cars and potentially steal anything they wanted, who else might be able to?
I had the dealership’s sales manager on tape admitting that the alarms were sold in sequences, and as many as 300 people had the same key and could easily open each other’s cars! But as I was sitting in the editing bay back at the TV station, putting the last touches on my story, there came a knock on the door.
It was the news director and the general manager.
It turned out that the moment I had left the dealership, that sales manager was on the phone with my general manager, threatening to pull the dealership’s advertising account if that story ever saw air.
The news director stood there behind me in the editing bay and said quietly, “Come on. Run the fucker.” He was an old-school newsman and he knew a good story when he saw it.
But the general manager vetoed the video, saying that the dealership’s big advertising account funded our entire newsroom budget and we simply couldn’t afford the hit.
My colleagues were torn. Most were against the censorship. But some said that the TV station was a private company and had the right to air, or not air, whatever the manager wanted.
It was a hard blow for me in my early days in news, excited about my first big exposé. But I soon learned that this kind of corporate censorship happens all the time, and at the higher levels it involves millions, even billions, of dollars. National news is the most censored news there is, because it’s funded by advertising that costs a fortune every day. And that is why big companies with big advertising accounts rarely get exposed by the media.
I’ve long advocated for some kind of protection for newsrooms. Freedom of the press should not be second to corporate greed. There should be laws protecting newsrooms from what happened to me. But there aren’t.
And now, companies like PayPal are closing the accounts of alternative journalists to prevent them from being paid for their work. PayPal tried to shut off funding to Consortium News, but backed down due to an “outpouring of support” by the publication’s readers. PayPal also canceled Mint Press News’ account without explanation. Those who are critical of NATO or the proxy war against Russia in Ukraine are targeted.
New platforms promise freedom of speech
There are plenty of people creating new platforms where you can freely post your stories, memes, photos and videos without fear of censorship. Telegram has its own separate browser free of any interference by the tech giants, but the system takes a bit of getting used to.
Investigative journalist Ben Swann, tired of his own work being scrubbed from the internet, set up a platform called “Sovren.” And there are many other sites which people are constantly asking me to join. The problem is that none of these platforms are so widely used as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube or the other giants. VKontakte or “VK,” Russia’s social media platform which is reminiscent of Facebook in its younger days, has very little censorship and even has English-speaking customer service representatives standing by if you have any technical problems or questions. But your American friends and family are unlikely to join you there.
Censorship and slander by other writers
Perhaps the saddest form of censorship I’ve seen is censorship from other alternative writers who seem to believe that there are only a limited number of readers out there and so they must make sure no one else gets any.
There are not many writers who dare to criticize NATO. We are a small group. Too small for the level of competition I see sometimes. Too small for the many divisions over minor points which crop up between us. We should be sticking together. Collaborating. But maybe people are just too accustomed to the dog-eat-dog world of journalism in capitalist society.
I’ve seen some writers launch smear campaigns against other writers, usually unwarranted and always unprofessional. I stop following people who engage in this kind of junior high “mean girl” behavior.
Sadly, there are some people out there who feel entitled to destroy other people’s lives.
About the author:
Deborah Armstrong currently writes about geopolitics with an emphasis on Russia. She previously worked in local TV news in the United States where she won two regional Emmy Awards. In the early 1990’s, Deborah lived in the Soviet Union during its final days and worked as a television consultant at Leningrad Television.
